Resume

November 2006 : I have read some nonsense on the web about December 2003, 3 years ago, when FSF USA took GNU Savannah management over FSF France, which one had created GNU Savannah in 2001. In December 2003, Vincent Caron, linked to FSF France, found out that the server had been compromised since several months. During 2003, I, myself linked to FSF France, repeatedly asked FSF USA to update the kernel of the GNU Savannah server because it had known security holes (ptrace bug, most notably) - I think these requests are probably in some mail-archives as they were sent on a public mailing-list at that time. Nobody from the FSF France never did such upgrade (kernel upgrades require reboot, indeed) because the server was located in Boston, USA, and it would have been unwise from FSF France people, by definition French, to do upgrades without hardware access to the server in case something go wrong. Considering all of this, I think quite questionable to put the blame about this compromise on FSF France-linked people, or, completely astonishing, on Savane, claiming it was unmaintained while the CVS of this project was very active at that time, while I remember having spent almost a whole dinner with Richard M. Stallman talking about Savane development when he came deliver a speech at CERN, Geneva, in late 2003, before the compromise was found.
In my opinion, GNU Savannah had been compromised because there was no strict policy about security updates and because no effort has been made to keep up with security issues (not to mention the fact that nothing can be secured at 100%, it is not realistic). There is no one to put the blame on specifically, just some things that were not crystal-clear. It is a bit sad that FSF USA decided to kick out all FSF France-linked people, so to kick out every person that had experience with such server management - considering for how long GNU Savannah stayed unusable afterwards, I think this was not a decision made at the advantage of users. All that explain why we founded Gna!: to continue what we started at GNU Savannah, to use our experience to provide a good development platform to Libre Software developers, with crystal-clear policies (see our constitution).

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